The Isis war resolution debate resounds with doublespeak
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Version 0 of 1. We’re more than six months into an illegal war and hardly anyone in DC seems to care. Congress continued to half-heartedly debate an ISIS war resolution this week, as the Senate held a hearing on the Obama administration’s proposed language for a three-year ISIS war that it belatedly wrote only a few weeks ago - after several months and thousands of bombs had been dropped in both Iraq and Syria. Sen. Bob Corker, meanwhile, says he his committee might get around to holding another hearing in a couple weeks. But he’s in no rush. It’s hard to figure out who is more to blame for the embarrassing damage both branches of government are currently doing to both the War Powers Act and the Constitution: a Congress that is too cowardly to take a stand, or an administration that insists it doesn’t matter what Congress does, they’re going to keep bombing Iraq and Syria for years either way. In the Senate hearing this week, the discussion focused on the nebulous language in the White House’s proposed bill and whether the Obama administration actually wants a ground war or not. The President, for months, has been insisting US combat troops would not be fighting on the ground - aside from their comically narrow definition of “combat troops” - but their war resolution paints a different picture. The language says it would “not authorize the use of the United States armed forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations.” (emphasis mine) That means combat troops are on the table, the question is only for how long. After being reminded that “enduring” could mean the administration could keep troops on the ground for as long as it wants, Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to draw a line in the sand at the Senate hearing: “If you’re going in for weeks and weeks of combat, that’s enduring,” he said. “If you’re going in to assist somebody and fire control and you’re embedded in an overnight deal, or you’re in a rescue operation or whatever, that is not enduring.” Oh really? At the very same hearing, retired General John Allen, special presidential envoy for the global anti-ISIS coalition, said this: “Enduring might be two weeks, it might be two years.” So there you have it. “Enduring” definitely doesn’t mean weeks and weeks, except when it does, and it could also mean years. Please excuse me for not trusting the definition of the vague wording of the Obama administration, considering they’ve managed to warp the definitions of several phrases into literally the opposite of their plain English meaning. Take the word “relevant” for example. Government lawyers convinced the secret FISA court to secretly re-interpret a provision in the Patriot Act that allows for the surveillance of phone records that are “relevant to an ongoing investigation.” Since everyone could potentially be involved in a future investigation, every single American’s phone call records are now considered “relevant,” and can therefore be collected and stored by the NSA. “Relevant” now means “any and all.” Or the phrase “imminent,” which the Obama administration uses to justify drone strikes on Americans overseas, despite the clear constitutional prohibitions against it. A person has to be an “imminent” threat to the US homeland to be targeted for killing, yet for someone to qualify, Obama administration lawyers believe it “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons will take place in the immediate future.” So in other words, “imminent” can mean a lot of things, including “not imminent.” Or how about the phrase “the war in Afghanistan is over”, which the Obama administration has repeatedly bragged about since December 2014, while the fighting by US troops has actually been increasing in secret. So something tells me “enduring” does not only mean just a few hours of fighting in an emergency. The truth is that with or without a war resolution, the government seems intent on entrenching us even deeper into a Forever War. Maybe before committing ourselves to another decades long war with open-ended legal authority we should meditate on where our previous decade’s global war has left us. |